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Snake oil is an expression that originally referred to fraudulent health products or unproven medicine but has come to refer to any product with questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit. By extension, a snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods or who is themselves a fraud, quack, charlatan, or the like. The use of snake oil long predates the 19th century, and it was never confined to the Americas. In Europe, viper oil had been commonly recommended for many afflictions, including the ones for which rattlesnake oil was subsequently favored (e.g., rheumatism and skin diseases). William S. Haubrich, in his book ''Medical Meanings'' (1997, American College of Physicians), mentions the hypothesis that the term came from the eastern United States. The Seneca people, indigenous to the New York and Pennsylvania region, would rub cuts and scrapes with the petroleum collected from oil seeps. European settlers observed this habit, and in mid-nineteenth century they began bottling and selling the substance as a cure-all. They named the product for the local tribe as "Seneca oil". Supposedly through mispronunciation, this became "Sen-ake-a oil" and eventually "snake oil".〔(Rosie Meistel, "Snake Oil Salesmen Weren't Always Considered Slimy", ''Los Angeles Times'', 1 July 2002 )〕 Haubrich remarked, "This story is almost too good to be true – which means it probably isn't." It appears to be a case of folk etymology, since no known historical evidence supports this explanation. ==History== Chinese laborers on railroad gangs involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad first gave snake oil to Europeans with joint pain. When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by rival medicine salesmen, and in time, ''snake oil'' became a generic name for many compounds marketed as panaceas or miraculous remedies whose ingredients were usually secret, unidentified, or mischaracterized and mostly inert or ineffective. Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton's Elixir in 1712. Since there was no federal regulation in the United States concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act〔(【引用サイトリンク】 The Long Struggle for the Law )〕 and various medicine salesmen or manufacturers seldom had enough skills in analytical chemistry to analyze the contents of snake oil, it became the archetype of hoax. The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a traveling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a shill) would often attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would leave town before his customers realized they had been cheated.〔 This practice is also called grifting and its practitioners are called grifters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Snake oil」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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